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Comment by HeckaSmart | Hacker News Reader

I personally think that the AR/VR will have a big market in the future. The question really is, how far away? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? And will Meta be one of the winners when it's all said and one?

Meta is hellbent on creating a platform so they can be the iOS/App Store instead of just an app.

The stock is sliding because we're entering/in a phase where raising money is hard and cash is king. Companies are trying to pull back on investments and bets that might or might not pay off. Meta just told Wallstreet that it doesn't plan to pull back on Metaverse spending in 2023.

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I still can't see how anyone would want to wear a headset for 8 hours a day to do their job like their promo videos show. Especially an office based job where their promotional videos show someone working with "large virtual screens" in an "ideal workspace setup". Surely most users would prefer actual screens and work without the headset on all day. Maybe the next hot thing is actually bigger and cheaper screens, not VR headsets.

I don't. I don't even own a VR headset. I tried the Quest Go or whatever it was called back in 2018. It was awful. I returned it immediately.

But I can see GenZ or the generation after GenZ embrace VR/AR. It doesn't have to be wearing a headset. It could be glasses when you're not wearing VR. It could be your phone when you're not wearing VR.

I still can't picture how anyone is supposed to get any actual work done when they've got that thing on.

I would only want a headset that could give me experiences I couldn't get anywhere else. Being trapped in a box and working sounds like prison.

A prison with sponsored skins for your virtual keyboard and mouse.

No one's proposing that, Meta was even showing off custom home environments for the Quest Pro https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pro-exclusive-home-envi... and you can use it for any other VR experience that you want.

Does anyone wants that ? A virtual luxury home in which you can't interact with anything ? Sounds like a nightmare

People pay a huge premium for a house or condo with a view. You can't easily go touch that view without travelling so I don't see a big difference there. Once consumer level devices catch up resolution wise with the insanely expensive business class headsets there will be almost no difference in the visual experience of looking through a headset vs looking through a window. With mixed reality you could even put that virtual window on your real wall.

If you're doing development for a VR application it's the way to go. Having to put the headset back on repeatedly to check out a change is annoying. I'd prefer all my meetings to be in VR as well since zoom is such a soulless and anti-social experience. My current work setup involves a 43" TV used as a main monitor so I can actually have enough room in the Unreal Editor to do shit plus 2 more monitors on the side for reference and other tools. I'm thinking of adding a couple more monitors since I still have to juggle windows sometimes. Being able to just have as many monitors as I needed at any one time positioned and sized perfectly would be a dream. Even when I'm doing non-VR development work I believe I'd benefit from this. The dealbreaker is how comfortable the headset is, I haven't tried the Quest Pro yet but it looks like they're moving in the right direction for comfort.

Have you ever tried virtual desktops? It was a huge benefit for me.

Meta's problem is that mark just told wall st. to fuck off. Every investor is screaming to lower costs and he's raising them. It's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark. This earnings report would mean Mark is fired even if he controlled 40% of the votes, it was that reckless.

>But really it's not next years profit that investors are scared about, it's their lack of control over mark.

Yeah, when things were booming no one cared about their class C shares that left control of these massive corporations in few hands. STONKS!

I sense that will change.

To me the issue is that Meta is pushing to attack three challenges at once.

On one hand there’s the hardware. Even now, people report motion sickness with the hardware. If you are trying to create a computing interaction medium of the future, these details around accessibility are going to be incredibly important. And I haven’t even mentioned battery life. So meta is working away at this very expensive challenge

The second challenge is the interaction model. No one is entirely convinced yet of what interaction with computers should look like in VR. Right now it’s “mouse/touch+windows but in VR. That’s like when TV and cameras first happened and it was theater shows but on the tv screen. So Meta now has to invent or at least shepherd computing integration models and that is also incredibly expensive.

And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. I interact with them more than I do with some of the people I know in real life. I play games online which have meta worlds (Minecraft, temtem, and animal crossing for example). I may not have a single game of infinite worlds and meeting places but the concept of a universe within my existing world already exists and it’s served to me by the internet. But Meta wants to make it a ready player one kind of experience where I interact with it through a VR experience. That seems really forced because they are drawing a line in the ground saying that VR is how the metaverse can exist. This is also an expensive bet especially when the interaction model hasn’t been figured out yet.

I don’t know where this is heading for meta but their goal of creating the next big computing and interaction platform with app stores that they control instead of apple or google is incredibly ambitious but seemingly poorly executed thus far.

I don’t disagree with your overarching analysis, but:

> And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media.

Meta properties are already a huge share of this activity. Think FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, …

they should focus on the B2B use cases, the Metaverse is cringeworthy but the virtual desktop stuff I've seen actually makes me consider buying.

They just need to show the ROI vs buying multiple monitors, maybe put out some studies showing their VR meetings are more effective than Zoom, show the productivity boost of being able to use VR to tune out distractions in open offices. Get enterprise customers to buy fleets of VR for their employees and then launch some sort of SaaS marketplace for Meta devices and take a cut. Facebook now has their app platform they've wanted

Zuck's focus on social is what's ruining it, plus just the optics of him. He needs to disappear for awhile

Watch the Quest Pro launch, it's very obviously B2B and pretty much exactly what you're describing sales wise.

The virtual monitors stuff looks pretty in tiny Internet videos, but doesn't hold up on the actual headset. The resolution of both of the display and passthrough cameras is still abysmal, barely better than Quest2 and a tiny fraction of a real monitor. You can compensate a bit by making the virtual monitors much bigger than a real one, but even that only goes so far. At the end of the day, it's about the same experience as putting a big old 720p TV on your desk.

Resolution aside, going with virtual monitors also just shows how primitive the whole thing still is. From a 'workspace in VR' I would expect to get actual window management and UI elements in full 3D space, not just my 2D monitor projected to a virtual rectangle. Microsoft's WMR Portal had that five years ago (not without faults), Meta's attempt feels quite primitive and basic in comparison.

The problem for Meta is that it's almost certainly not going to look like what they're selling with their Metaverse which is some kind of Second Life knockoff. They went all in on a failed plan.

Well if all the end up with is the best hardware that's definitely going to be worth something. But what they really want is the app that people spend all their time on.

What they really want is to be the iOS and the App Store. They don't want to live under Apple and Google's roofs anymore. They want control. And they want to be the one taxing apps 30% instead of Apple and Google.

Maybe, they do have their own store for VR apps but they also allow you to connect the headset to a gaming PC and use Steam games. They also support OpenXR. So they don't seem to be building a walled garden, more like a garden with a fence you can step over. Maybe that'll change in the future but if it does they'll piss off a lot of their customers and force them to switch to other hardware.

I think Valve will get the best hw award.

They've been consistently the best since the beginning

I think Apple will come out with the best hardware.

Why?

1. Best mobile SoC designs by far. Not even close.

2. Hardware company at heart. Their culture is built for hardware.

3. Way more supply chain and mass manufacturing experience which means cheaper manufacturing.

4. Hardware designed for iPhone, iPad, Mac can be reused for VR/AR which means lower costs and more economy of scale. IE. M2 is used on both iPad and Macs. M2 cores are derived from A15 from iPhone 13.

My guess is Valve is bought by Apple at some point.

Uh...are you forgetting that Valve owns Steam?

There's no way Valve would ever be sold to Apple.

Ya i know, do you think the Gov would not allow it?

No, I think Valve doesn't want to be bought, whether it's through an acquisition or by IPO.

Valve was bootstrapped by Gaben. It doesn't have any investors that want an exit, doesn't need to raise funds, and Gaben is already a billionaire. They have no incentive to sell themselves.

I def agree, but things change. Gabe will get older at some point and something will happen. If not him, his kids.

Does Valve have a great track record with hardware? The Steam Machines, Steam Controller and the Steam link aren't really talked about or mentioned in gaming circles anymore.

I'm not necessarily buying that Meta is going to have the best hardware.

the rebranding was to skirt antitrust and regulatory scrutiny. They’re trying to convince regulators and the jury they are a AR/VR company, even though their entire business is (and will be) all funded by ads and data mining.

I agree with you.

This very much reminds me of Apple's Newton. It was actually quite amazing given the technical constraints imposed on making something to be shipped in volume, but not only was it underpowered for what it tried to be, the "killer app" for mobile devices would turn out to be wireless internet connectivity, and the world simply wasn't ready for that yet.

Apple started Newton development in 1987, killed it in 1997 when Jobs returned, and launched iPhone in 2007, arguably the biggest consumer product hit in history.

I'm rooting for Meta's demise, but history shows that it's quite possible for a company to try something, fail spectacularly, but come back and get it right when the universe catches up to the ambition.

Then again, Palm launched their first device in 1996, and had a big hit. But by the end of 2011, they were done. There are no guarantees that the company creating a market will be the one to profit from it.

When you don’t have to wear an absurd headset

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